[Gambas-user] Hello and questions

[Robert Rowe]

I just discovered Gambas yesterday and I'm quite impressed. I'd like to 
thank Benoît for writing Gamabs. I'm a professional VB developer and 
have missed VB since I switched to Linux (Kubuntu) about a year ago. I'm 
stuck with Windows at work since our customers use Windows. I used to 
make little apps at home when needed but I hate to bring up a VMWare 
session for such small tasks. It looks like Gambas will solve this for me.

I have a couple of questions though.

1. I couldn't find a place on the website to submit suggestions. Is this 
mailing list the appropriate place for suggestions?

2. I found the bug tracker but couldn't seem to access the page(s) that 
showed the description of the listed bugs. Am I missing something? I'd 
hate to submit a duplicate bug report.

3. I'd have to agree with Richard Terry that an efficient workflow is 
critical. I use a large number of addons with VB at work. I didn't see a 
way to add extensions to Gambas. Does it have this ability? If not then 
do you except source code changes to the IDE? I'd be willing to write 
several tools that could be added to the IDE. I'd prefer a plugin type 
system so that each user could choose whether to have the tool or not.

4. Another thing that I do a lot at work with VB is to write controls as 
the built in controls are rather lackluster. Do components have to be 
written in C or can they be written in Gambas? If they can be written in 
Gambas, is there a how-to somewhere?

5. The first thing that I did after installing Gambas was to try to run 
the samples. None of them would compile. I eventually figured out that 
it was because I was running Gambas as a normal user. When I ran as root 
the samples ran well and were impressive. My suspicion is that Gambas 
needs to write the compiled file(s) somewhere and my normal user 
couldn't write to that location. It seems this location must be the 
project folder which is /usr/share/gambas2/examples/ for me. Is there a 
way to tell Gambas to write the compiled files to another location (like 
the temp folder) when running a read only project.

6. I know that I'm a Gambas newbie but I'm a BASIC veteran (over 25 
years) and I'm sure that I will pick it up quickly. What would be the 
best way for me to contribute? I stink at C and I'm an okay document writer.

7. I've been reading through 
"Getting Started with Gambas Version 2: A Tutorial" by 
timothy.marshal­nichols at ...1868... He says that his screenshots were 
taken from Gambas2. I have Gambas2 installed.  In has screenshot of the 
New Project Wizard there are several options that I don't have including 
an option to import a VB project.  I'm very interested in importing VB 
projects. Am I somehow missing this option or do I need to install 
something else? I installed everything from the repository at danicafe. 
I can provide a package list if this would help.

8. I'm a hotkey junkie and was very pleased to see that most of the 
hotkeys in Gamabs were the same as the ones in VB. Not all are though. 
Is there a way to configure the hotkeys?

9. I prefer a green background with a white foreground for comment 
lines. I find that this makes them stand out. I located the option to 
change the syntax highlighting colors but I couldn't set the background 
color. Is this possible? Maybe I could edit some config file directly if 
the option isn't available from the options screen.

10. This next one is more of a suggestion. I love the intellisense 
menus. In many ways they are superior to VB. One thing that I ran into 
though was that you seem to have to press enter to choose the item from 
the list. If this could be triggered on the keypress of any non-alpha 
character then it would allow me to press the . or = to choose the item 
and continue with the statement. I know it only saves a few keystrokes 
be this adds up after a while.

Robert Rowe